


The Douglas Theory: Primary Source

by ptera



Series: Prophetic Postulates [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Agnes Nutter's Prophecies, Aziraphale Loves Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale and Crowley's Bodyswap (Good Omens), Crowley Loves Aziraphale (Good Omens), Gen, Ineffable Idiots (Good Omens), M/M, Missing Scene, Scene: The Bus Stop (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:29:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23597623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ptera/pseuds/ptera
Summary: Douglas MacKinnon said they switch on the bench before the bus arrives.Or, Crowley makes time for the one he loves.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Prophetic Postulates [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1707445
Comments: 9
Kudos: 53





	The Douglas Theory: Primary Source

**Author's Note:**

> This is a series of vignettes where each story presents opportunities to swap at different points in episode six. They’re self-contained and can be read separately, but they sort of build on each other as Crowley & Aziraphale delay longer and longer.

_When alle is fayed and all is done,  
ye must choofe your faces wisely,  
for soon enouff ye will be playing with fyre.  
_

Six thousand years and the other side of an otherwise unimportant bench was as good as the other side of the world. _Six thousand years on this twirling rock_ , Crowley almost said aloud, dangling the wine bottle by the neck. Six thousand years and their clandestine affair brought them from the Beginning in the Garden to this inscrutable, Ineffable Hereafter where the last doom of Damocles swung a hair’s breadth from their throats.

Aziraphale held himself prim and upright, firmly butted up against the far armrest, as if he wasn’t exhausted, wrung out, and clinging to presentable respectability by his last good brain cell the way one does after downing half a bottle of _bougalis nouveau_ from the village liquor shop (the selection was, as the angel generously put it, “limited”). 

Crowley ached for Aziraphale, who had lost the bookshop and burned his alliances. They had no side but their own - _literally_ had only themselves - and Aziraphale was still more than an arm's length away and rigid as a statue. To anyone else, the angel looked like a tired man drinking away a bad shock in worse company. However, through Crowley’s eyes, Aziraphale’s immobilized exterior was the vice holding in a terrible internal struggle with facts of the failed apocalypse - as well as what was to come.

They would have to choose wisely, after all.  
  
The Oxford bus rolled over the rise, its lights flashing over them, and slowed its approach as if their wooden bench outside the Tadfield vicarage was a regular Oxfordian stop on its usual Oxford route. Crowely turned towards the bus as if he were just a regular Oxford-going bus patron indicating an interest to the driver at this perfectly normal stop at a not-unusual hour that they were the perfect would-be passengers for said bus to Oxford-London.

It was time to be getting on.  
  
“ _Wait_ ,” said Aziraphale, who had not otherwise moved.  
  
Crowley, whose arm had been arcing out and palm up to the driver, in that last moment, flicked his fingers just enough to trigger his own demonic magic and stopped time.  
  
It took six thousand years of knowing an ethereal being to correctly interpret the tone of one plaintive “wait” to mean all of: “stop everything”, “this is important”, “hear me now”, and “there’s no time”. Six thousand years of friendship and one apocalypse to develop a reflexive reaction the tone of a single word from his lips.

Yet that one word stopped everything. The bus, the village, the whole world in fact, flash-froze without a stutter. Crowley himself was not so much frozen as stunned by his instinctive response to Aziraphale’s plea. His arm dropped in a slow, jerking motion, adrift in the action’s aftermath until it settled more or less on his equally stunned knee. Crowley took his own moment to acknowledge the turn of events, then shifted back on the bench and looked over at the angel.  
  
Aziraphale held himself more still than the stuck-fast world around them – braced on the bench, knees slammed together, and hands in his lap. His eyes looked wide and tired, exhausted yet startled, like he’d confronted an insane thought and found himself heartily agreeing.  
  
“Angel?” Crowley said gently, turning fully towards the one being in the universe he gave a damn about.  
  
Unmoved and still staring dead ahead at a hedge row across the lane, but braced and determined, Aziraphale made himself speak, “Angels can possess people.”  
  
“So you’ve proven,” agreed Crowley, in the same tone of voice Nanny Ashtorath used to soothe Warlock not that long ago.  
  
Aziraphale swallowed. “Demons can possess people.” He looked down at his lap now, knuckles whiter than his hair.  
  
Crowley hand started towards Aziraphale, reached out to touch Aziraphale, but Crowley hid the intention by laying his arm across the back of the bench, “Not that I recommend it.”  
  
“Our corporations are issued by our re-respective..” Aziraphale stumbled, truly he nearly crumbled thinking of an acceptable euphemism, “…employers.”  
  
Crowley nodded his head, still not daring to make physical contact, not daring to comfort. Just nodding in support from a safe distance.  
  
“Our corporations are separate from our essential selves. A natural container for the supernatural.” Aziraphale drew a fortifying breath, “Oh Crowley…”, he drew another, “what if we could swap?”  
  
Now was Crowley’s turn to freeze up, “Swap?”  
  
Aziraphale finally moved, scooting towards him and almost closing the gap between them. He had that eager, knowing look he got after finding a new favorite restaurant, “Switch corporations - ‘chose each other’s faces’ as it were.”  
  
_Oh, that was a bad idea_. Crowley leaned away, right hand hitching up between them, “Probably explode.”

“That was when I was suggesting to possess you and share your corporation,” Aziraphale leaned in towards him, “I needed someone receptive.”

Make no mistake, Crowley was receptive. He was _very_ receptive. “Still might explode,” he reasoned, reasonably. How he could talk sense at this moment of pure senselessness was its own miracle.

Aziraphale shook his head, “I don’t think so anymore. I think it’ll work.”

“...because angels can possess people,” Crowley deadpanned. _Definitely going to explode_.

“We were made from the same stock.” Aziraphale, now unbound from the old rules, took Crowley’s hand. “I think I’ve got the feel of it, my dear. Follow my lead.” 

Aziraphale pulled Crowley’s other hand up from where it rested across his knee, gently extracted the bottle and set it on the ground. Crowley let himself be manipulated like a marinet, let Aziraphale hold both his hands between their laps.

“Riding around with Madame Tracey was quite informative,” Aziraphale squeezed their hands, a small smile blooming on his face. 

Crowley met Aziraphale’s eyes over his glasses, uncertainty writ large. “What… ah, what do we need to do, angel?”  
  
Aziraphale’s thumbs rubbed circles in Crowley’s palms, “Trust each other. Well, more that I need to trust you and put my trust _in_ you.”

“You can trust me, angel,” Crowley whispered, shifting his hands to hold Aziraphale’s more firmly.

Aziraphale reached out, not on the physical plane as a human would expect, but on the astral plane he was recently discorporated to. Crowley felt Aziraphale cup his cheek, felt the angel’s ethereal nature brush along his cheekbone.

 _I know_ , Aziraphale conveyed the true trust in his heart without words, conveyed instead with every emotion.

Crowley leaned into the ethereal energy, its warmth and comfort like a low wave washed over him. On that same otherworldly plane he let it carry him, guide him - his infernal nature buoyed along on an ethereal tide out of his human-like corporation. Instead of a halocline of heavenly and hellish energies, they flowed together as an earthly estuary of liminal space.

Crowley settled into Aziraphale’s corporation the same way he settled into the couch in the shop: sinking into the steadfast and familiar comfort with every intention of staying put for days. 

Crowley opened Aziraphale’s eyes and felt the roughness of his old hands now held in Aziraphale’s soft, manicured ones. When he looked up Crowley’s face gave an uncharacteristically sweet smile.

“It worked,” Crowley said, stunned anew.

“It worked! Oh, my dear!” Aziraphale effused, now looking less like a wholesome, church-going bookseller and more like an old, pill-faced rocker. 

The dissonance was cemented when that same happy Aziraphale kissed his hands and flashed him a look over the top of his glasses, then had the audacity to do it again.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley managed.

“I know, no time,” Aziraphale said seriously, “but there will be time for us and for everything once see this through.” Aziraphale-as-Crowley turned to the bus, arm thoughtlessly raised to signal the driver a second time.

“Yes, there will be time enough for everything,” Crowley agreed, sweeping his hand down then up to reverse the miracle. The world went back to full motion without a care for the long pause and partial prophetic fulfillment.

It was time to be getting on.

* * *

"And indeed there will be time  
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,  
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;  
There will be time, there will be time  
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;  
There will be time to murder and create,  
And time for all the works and days of hands  
That lift and drop a question on your plate;  
Time for you and time for me,  
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,  
And for a hundred visions and revisions,  
Before the taking of a toast and tea."

\-- T. S. Eliot, _[The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock)_

**Author's Note:**

> Douglas MacKinnon's [Tweet](https://twitter.com/drmuig/status/1192116249070854145).  
> [Original Tumblr post/inspo](https://theoverlordmisha.tumblr.com/post/188966778973/regarding-the-crowleyaziraphale-swap).


End file.
